What You Do to Me, No One Knows
by nubianamy
Summary: A collection of Puck/Finn drabbles inspired by songs. Pinn, slash, ratings range from K to M.
1. Contact is all that it takes

_(Author's note: so I had this Puck/Finn Youtube playlist ( www. youtube playlist?list=PLE618DC69C20D47BB) with some random songs people had suggested for them, as inspiration. I asked on tumblr for more suggestions (thanks, penthea and ca-babs). Then I took the first stanza or verse from each song to use as a prompt for a drabble. Here are the first three. I'll keep adding to this . Happy Pinn week, day four (songs) and day five (too many feels). -amy)_

* * *

_Contact is all that it takes  
__To change your life, to lose your place in time  
__Contact, asleep or awake  
__Coming around you may wake up to find_

_- Van Halen, "Love Walks In"_

_ www. youtube watch?v=sjsEbADRh3k&feature=share&list=PLE618DC69C20D47BB_

Finn didn't look angry or upset, just lost in thought, sitting at a desk in Schue's empty classroom. Whatever had happened between the moment Puck had picked him up to drive to school, and now, Puck had no idea. It didn't much matter. He waited outside the doorway to the room, talking to San and Britt, pretending to care what Chelsea was saying about the party at her house that weekend, but all his attention was on the door. As soon as he decided Finn wasn't coming out, Puck slipped in, excusing himself from the conversation.

"Hey." He reached out, grasping Finn's shoulder, without even thinking about asking permission. Finn looked up from where he was staring at the desk in front of him, blinking. The bewildered smile he gave Puck was enough to freak him out a little, but Puck just smiled back, trying to look reassuring. "You skipping lunch today?"

"I don't know," Finn admitted. "I just got some... confusing news. About my dad."

Puck nodded. "You wanna tell me about it? Screw lunch, we could just, you know, go sit in my truck." Because Finn looked like he might break if somebody looked at him wrong, and it'd probably be better if he didn't do it in the middle of the Spanish room.

Finn nodded, moving slowly to push his chair in and gather up his things. He followed Puck out to the parking lot, and when Puck unlocked the door for him, he slid in to sit on the edge of the seat, staring at nothing. His hands lay open on his lap like broken eggshells.

Puck didn't even bother to go around to the other side of the car. Fuck whoever was watching; he would deal with them later, because this was his boy, and he wasn't going to leave him to deal with whatever this was alone. "I'm just gonna-" he murmured, moving in to lean his shins against the side step, and slid his arms around Finn's rib cage just as he started to cry.

"I can't believe she didn't tell me," he sobbed, the words barely decipherable. "She said he was a _war hero._ Only he _wasn't._"

"Yeah?" Puck threw his weight against Finn to keep him from tumbling out of the truck, clutching the back of his neck. This was going to be one fucking mess. "But today, she told you?"

"Mr. Schue." He sniffed bitterly. "Called them. Told my mom and Burt about me wanting to join the Army. It was, like, some kind of intervention."

"Yeah," Puck said again, only now he was struggling not to ball his fist in Finn's shirt and punch him senseless, because _what the fuck, the Army? _But Finn didn't need that right now. Right now, he was going to stand right where he was and hug him until Finn stopped shaking, and probably longer than that, long after it got awkward. The only way things were going to feel any easier was if Finn remembered that he'd lived sixteen years without a dad, just like Puck had, and they'd both gotten through it okay. He pressed his fingertips into Finn's skin.

"I don't know how to deal with this," whispered Finn.

"You don't have to right now," Puck said. "Just sit there and let me handle it."


	2. I'm alone, yeah

_I'm alone, yeah, I don't know if I can face the night  
__I'm in tears and the cryin' that I do is for you  
__I want your love  
__Let's break the walls between us  
__Don't make it tough  
__I'll put away my pride  
__Enough's enough  
__I've suffered and I've seen the light_

_- Aerosmith, "Angel"_

_ www. youtube watch?v=LKXJt-XUuMo&feature=share&list=PLE618DC69C20D47BB_

Puck watched the neon sign outside the window of his shithole apartment change from pink, to bright yellow, to blue-white and back about six thousand times without calling Finn. It wasn't that he didn't want to. It was that he didn't know what he would have told him. _The city sucks as much as it did yesterday,_ he might have said,_ and the stupid fucking lights are keeping me awake again. How's the army?_ Only he didn't really want to hear the answer to that, so he didn't call, even though Burt had given him the number over a month ago.

Nothing got easier until he started playing his guitar for tips near the Hollywood and Vine Metro station. He didn't make a lot of money, but he got some smiles, a lot more than he got scowls, and that was good enough. But it got him playing again, which he hadn't done hardly at all since he'd left Lima at the beginning of the summer. It felt good, familiar, and maybe it hurt a little less to be a loser in LA when people threw dollars or fives into his case as they walked by.

He didn't know what it was that made him play that stupid Aerosmith song in the first place. It was something Finn had listened to, and Puck had teased him mercilessly for it, but of course he knew all the lyrics, and the changes were easy, and he might have worked up the guitar solo at one point.

The guy who stopped to listen didn't look anything like Finn. He was short and wiry and his skin was coffee-colored, like he probably had some Hispanic in him somewhere. But he had a set of lungs, and he set right in to singing the harmonies with Puck, startling him into missing a cue. They sang the whole fucking song like that, Puck doing melody and the guy soaring above, and by the end Puck was about three seconds away from bursting into tears.

"That was awesome," the guy said reverently.

"Yeah," Puck admitted, looking away. "I feel like I should be tipping _you."_

He touched Puck's guitar case with a little half-smile. "You've sung that one before, with some other guy."

"I - yeah. Used to." No sense in denying it. They'd been singing it since before Finn's voice had changed.

"You should call him," he said. "Don't let it go."

"He doesn't care." Puck stood his guitar on his lap, cradling the body in his arms. "Not - not like that." _Not like I do._

"Don't matter," he said earnestly. "You want it, what've you got to lose? Take the weight off your heart, man."

Puck went home that night and lay on his mattress and stared at the neon sign, pink-yellow-blue, pink-yellow-blue, drumming a slow beat on his knee, until he found enough courage - or maybe desperation, he wasn't sure - to pick up his phone and dial the number Burt had given him. He rested his phone on his chest, listening to it ring on speaker. It wouldn't matter what Finn said in response. It was enough, just to know he'd hear, finally, what Puck had been thinking for the better part of six years.


	3. Look at this photograph

_Look at this photograph  
__Everytime I do it makes me laugh  
__How did our eyes get so red  
__And what the hell is on Joey's head_

_- Nickelback, "Photograph"_

www. youtube watch?v=St9YWSFe4Uo&list=PLE618DC69C20D47BB

Finn recognized about every third figure in the photo montage displayed on the wall outside the gym. Granted, he'd never had the best memory, but he wondered for a minute if half of these people had even ever _gone_ to McKinley. He reached over the cafeteria table and brushed a finger over a snapshot of Britt and Mike, laughing their asses off at something Kurt was saying.

"I know Britt's here," he heard a familiar voice say, "with her husband, but I didn't see Mike anywhere."

Finn smiled before he even turned his head. "I wouldn't blame him for not deigning to rub elbows with us ordinary Midwestern folk. He's got to be almost as busy as you."

Noah looked a lot like he had in the photos Finn had seen in _Entertainment Weekly_ after the Academy Awards last month - which was to say rather a lot like the bad-ass in the mohawk he'd been ten years ago. He was a little heavier, a little calmer, but the cocky attitude hadn't vanished. He smirked, and it was so familiar that Finn struggled to maintain his own aplomb.

"I can't say I'm not," Noah agreed. "The studio's got post-production under control on the fourth film, though, and I've got a few weeks before they're going to be on me to option scripts for five through eight. What better place to kick back and relax than Lima, Ohio?"

Finn snorted appreciation for his tone. "I can think of about fifty. Once my mom and Burt took off, I was glad to leave it behind for good."

Noah's smile didn't flicker, but his eyes landed on Finn's left hand and the ring on his fourth finger. "Where's your better half? Don't tell me she sent you here alone?"

"No," Finn said. He shoved his hand in his pocket, rubbing the ring with his thumb. "Actually the divorce was final as of two weeks ago."

Puck paused in his motion, his body slowing enough to stand silently still while he contemplated this fact. "I'm sorry. I assumed - fuck, Hudson, I'm sorry."

"Don't be. Neither of us were happy for the last couple years." It only hurt a little to see the sympathy in Noah's face. _You wouldn't be saying that if you had seen the way we'd screamed at each other, the words we said. No one should say things like that to someone they love._

It didn't even occur to him until later that evening, when they'd indeed found Mike and Britt and the rest of the original Glee folks - except Rachel, of course, though none of them expected her to come, as close to delivering as she was - that _he_ had been the one to scream things at Noah, back then. He'd said all kinds of awful things, and Noah had forgiven him, just as his wife had done, and he'd done for her, many times before the end.

"That was a long time ago," he said again and again, as kids from their graduating class brought up moments from their four years at McKinley. Finn had plenty of years after to remember, too, when he'd helped with Glee club, but once Mr. Schuester had transferred, Glee had been more work than he could handle on his own. The club had dwindled to too few to compete by the time he was ready to leave Ohio.

"I haven't talked to him in years," was another phrase he said more than once. Mostly he didn't care, and really, if he'd never seen Rick or Azimio at all, ever again, he would have been okay with that. He guessed they might have turned into okay guys, but that was all in his past, and he really didn't want to reopen old wounds - or introduce new ones.

It was Kurt who found him seated beside the punch bowl just after eleven, sipping the foam off the top of an absurdly-colored sherbet drink while dancers moved to and from the floor around him. Kurt regarded him thoughtfully.

"Why are you here, Finn?" asked Kurt.

"To - what's the verb for _going to a reunion?_ To reune?_"_

"To reconnect with old friends. To reminisce about old times. To revisit _things you regret not doing."_ Kurt stared at him, his eyebrow pointed. "Don't make me go get him and drag him over here."

"There's nothing he needs to hear from me, Kurt." Finn sounded far more tired than he thought a twenty-eight-year-old divorced guy should. "He's going on with living his life. I'm starting mine over again."

Kurt took the cup of punch from his hand and set it to the side. "Yes, and how many times are you going to have to restart yours before you feel like you've done it the way it should be? Isn't this your chance?"

"What kind of a chance?" he snapped. "He's not Blaine, you know. Nothing's changed for _him."_

"Except you're single," Kurt pointed out, ignoring the dig about Blaine. "And I bet he'd be the first to agree that that's something. Aren't you going to at least tell him that?"

"I did. Doesn't matter, does it? He doesn't know I like guys."

"Since when has that ever mattered between the two of you?" Kurt hissed. "He knows you like _him._ You're both in town tonight. And don't tell me you don't want him anymore; I've seen you trolling his fan club blog."

"You picked up some bad habits from Santana," Finn muttered. "I just don't think it's a good -"

His words trailed off as he looked up to see Noah standing there beside Kurt. He definitely gave him a run for his money in his fancy designer suit.

"If you don't have anything else to do," he said softly, "I thought you might want to dance."

Finn held very still while he confirmed that Noah was looking at _him,_ not Kurt, and that he wasn't joking, and that the world hadn't ended. Then he stood up and smiled.

"I'm not any better of a dancer than I was ten years ago," he warned him, taking his hand.

Noah laughed as he led him onto the floor. "Just another thing that hasn't changed."


End file.
